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In a letter of December 22, 1897, Sigmund Freud wrote to Wilhelm Fleiss: "[B]irth, miscarriage, and menstruation are all connected with the lavatory via the word Abort (Abortus)" (p. 240). In German this word does effectively carry these different meanings.

Freud was to further develop these reflections in his "Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality" (1905d), where he describes the phases of libidinal development from birth onward. The retention of fecal matter initially corresponds with an intention to use it for masturbatory purposes. The whole meaning of the anal zone is thus reflected in the fact that "few neurotics are to be found without their special scatological practices, ceremonies, and so on, which they carefully keep secret" (p. 187).

However, another link, that between fecal matter and money, emerged in listening to the discourse of obsessive patients; this link is expressed in one of the traits of the anal character, avarice. Freud writes in "Dreams in Folklore" (1958 [1911]): "How old this connection between excrement and Gold is can be seen from an observation by Jeremias: gold, according to ancient oriental mythology, is the excrement of hell" (p. 187).

Based on these associations, Freud establishes a symbolic equation that he phrases as follows: "[I]n the products of the unconscious—spontaneous ideas, phantasies, and symptoms—the concepts faeces (money, gift), baby and penis are ill-distinguished from one another and are easily interchangeable" (p. 128). When the child perceives that woman does not have a penis, the latter is conceived as being detachable and is thus analogous to excrement when it is separated from the body. In the same text, Freud underscores the importance of this equivalence in terms of the object: "Defaecation affords the first occasion on which the child must decide between a narcissistic and an object-loving attitude. He either parts obediently with his faeces, 'sacrifices' them to his love, or else retains them for purposes of auto-erotic satisfaction and later as a means of asserting his own will" (p. 130). The love object that must be renounced (the mother of childhood), the lost object, will be identified by the Unconscious with feces, the body's most intimate product, which must necessarily be relinquished; this marks the onset of the dynamics of loss, mourning, and melancholia.

Returning to the connection between feces and money in "From the History of an Infantile Neurosis" (1918b [1914]), Freud emphasizes that an interest in money is libidinal rather than rational in character, and that it thus relates back to excremental pleasure. The various terms in the sequence filth = money = gift = child = penis are thus treated as synonyms and represented by shared symbols.

In his "New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis" (1933a), Freud completed his views: According to infantile theories of sexuality, the child is born from the intestine as a piece of feces; defecation is the model for the act of being born. "A great part of anal erotism is thus carried over into a cathexis of the penis" (p. 101), he writes.

DOMINIQUE J. ARNOUX

See also: Alpha function; Autism; Beta-elements; Castration complex; Coprophilia; Partial drive; Pregnancy, fantasy of; Stammering; Symbolism; Unconcscious concept.